To attempt to understand the driving
motivation behind these environmental organizations and the individuals
involved, it is helpful to read their statements in their own words.

Wild Earth
magazine, a journal promoting radical environmentalism, included a
manifesto for the extinction of the human race, written under the
pseudonym "Les U. Knight." The article said, "If you haven't given
voluntary human extinction much thought before, the idea of a world with
no people in it may seem strange. But, if you give it a chance, I think
you might agree that the extinction of Homo sapiens would mean survival
for millions, if not billions, of Earth-dwelling species. . . . Phasing
out the human race will solve every problem on earth, social and
environmental" ("Voluntary Human Extinction,"
Wild Earth,
Vol. 1, No. 2, 72).

“We must make this an insecure and inhospitable place
for capitalists and their projects. We must reclaim the roads and plowed
land, halt dam construction, tear down existing dams, free shackled rivers
and return to wilderness millions of acres of presently settled land.”
- David Foreman, co-founder of Earth First!

“Isn’t the only hope for the planet that the industrialized civilizations
collapse? Isn’t it our responsibility to bring that about?”
- Maurice Strong, founder of the UN Environment Programme

“A massive campaign must be launched to de-develop the
United States. De-development means bringing our
economic system into line with the realities of ecology and the world
resource situation.”
- Paul Ehrlich, Professor of Population Studies

“The only hope for the world is to make sure there is
not another United States. We can’t let other countries have the same
number of cars, the amount of industrialization, we have in the US. We
have to stop these Third World countries right where they are.”
- Michael Oppenheimer, Environmental Defense Fund

“Complex technology of any sort is an assault on human
dignity. It would be little short of disastrous for us to
discover a source of clean, cheap, abundant energy, because of what we
might do with it.”
- Amory Lovins, Rocky Mountain Institute

“The prospect of cheap fusion energy is the worst thing
that could happen to the planet.”
- Jeremy Rifkin, Greenhouse Crisis Foundation

“Giving society cheap, abundant energy would be the
equivalent of giving an idiot child a machine gun.”
- Prof Paul Ehrlich, Stanford University

“Our insatiable drive to rummage deep beneath the
surface of the earth is a willful expansion
of our dysfunctional civilization into Nature.”
- Al Gore, Earth in the Balance

“The big threat to the planet is people: there are too
many, doing too well economically and burning too much oil.”
– Sir James Lovelock, BBC Interview

“My three main goals would be to reduce human population
to about 100 million worldwide, destroy the industrial infrastructure and
see wilderness, with it’s full complement of species, returning throughout
the world.”
-Dave Foreman, co-founder of Earth First!

“All these dangers are caused by human intervention and
it is only through changed attitudes and
behaviour that they can be overcome. The real enemy, then, is humanity
itself.”
- Club of Rome, The First Global Revolution

“Mankind is the most dangerous, destructive, selfish and
unethical animal on the earth.”
- Michael Fox, vice-president of The Humane Society

“Humans on the Earth behave in some ways like a
pathogenic micro-organism, or like the cells of a tumor.”
- Sir James Lovelock, Healing Gaia

“The Earth has cancer and the cancer is Man.”
- Club of Rome, Mankind at the Turning Point

"A cancer is an uncontrolled multiplication of cells,
the population explosion is an uncontrolled multiplication of people.
We must shift our efforts from the treatment of the symptoms to the
cutting out of the cancer. The operation will demand many apparently
brutal and heartless decisions."
- Prof. Paul Ehrlich, The Population Bomb

"A reasonable estimate for an industrialized world
society at the present North American material standard of living would be
1 billion. At the more frugal European standard of living, 2 to 3
billion would be possible."
- United Nations, Global Biodiversity Assessment

“A total population of 250-300 million people, a 95%
decline from present levels, would be ideal.”
- Ted Turner, founder of CNN and major UN donor

“… the resultant ideal sustainable population is hence
more than 500 million but less than one billion.”
- Club of Rome, Goals for Mankind

"One America burdens the earth much more than twenty
Bangladeshes. This is a terrible thing to say in order to stabilize
world population, we must eliminate 350,000 people per day. It is a
horrible thing to say, but it's just as bad not to say it."
- Jacques Cousteau, UNESCO Courier

“If I were reincarnated I would wish to be returned to
earth as a killer virus to lower human population levels.”
- Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, patron of the World Wildlife Fund

“I suspect that eradicating small pox was wrong. It
played an important part in balancing ecosystems.”
- John Davis, editor of Earth First! Journal

“The extinction of the human species may not only be
inevitable but a good thing.”
- Christopher Manes, Earth First!

"Childbearing should be a punishable crime against
society, unless the parents hold a government license. All potential
parents should be required to use contraceptive chemicals, the government
issuing antidotes to citizens chosen for childbearing."
- David Brower, first Executive Director of the Sierra Club

“In searching for a new enemy to unite us, we came up
with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water
shortages, famine and the like would fit the bill.”
- Club of Rome, The First Global Revolution

“We need to get some broad based support, to capture the
public’s imagination… So we have to offer up scary scenarios, make
simplified, dramatic statements and make little mention of any doubts…
Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective
and being honest.”
- Stephen Schneider, Stanford Professor of Climatology, lead author of
many IPCC reports

“Unless we announce disasters no one will listen.”
- Sir John Houghton, first chairman of IPCC

“It doesn’t matter what is true, it only matters what
people believe is true.”
- Paul Watson, co-founder of Greenpeace

"We've got to ride this global warming issue. Even
if the theory of global warming is wrong, we will be doing the right thing
in terms of economic and environmental policy."
- Timothy Wirth, President of the UN Foundation

"No matter if the science of global warming is all
phony, climate change provides the greatest opportunity to bring about
justice and equality in the world."
-Christine Stewart, fmr Canadian Minister of the Environment

"The climate crisis is not a political issue, it is a
moral and spiritual challenge to all of humanity. It is also our
greatest opportunity to lift Global Consciousness to a higher level."
- Al Gore, accepting the Nobel Peace Prize

"The only way to get our society to truly change is to
frighten people with the possibility of a catastrophe."
- emeritus professor Daniel Botkin

"We are on the verge of a global transformation.
All we need is the right major crisis."
- David Rockefeller, Club of Rome executive manager

"Humanity is sitting on a time bomb. If the vast
majority of the world's scientists are right, we have just ten years to
avert a major catastrophe that could send out entire planet's climate
system into a tail-spin of epic destruction involving extreme weather,
floods, droughts, epidemics and killer heat waves beyond anything we have
ever experienced - a catastrophe of our own making."
- Al Gore, An Inconvenient Truth

"By the end of this century, climate change will reduce
the human population to a few breeding pairs surviving near the Arctic."
- Sir James Lovelock, Revenge of Gaia

"Climate Change will result in a catastrophic, global
seal level rise of seven meters. That's bye-bye most of Bangladesh,
Netherlands, Florida and would make London the new Atlantis."
- Greenpeace International

"Climate change is real. Not only is it real, it's
here, and its effects are giving rise to a frighteningly new global
phenomenon - the man-made natural disaster."
- Barack Obama, US Presidential Candidate

"We are close to a time when all of humankind will
envision a global agenda that encompasses a kind of Global Marshall Plan
to address the causes of poverty and suffering and environmental
destruction all over the earth."
- Al Gore, Earth in the Balance

"In Nature organic growth proceeds according to a Master
Plan, a Blueprint. Such a 'master plan' is missing from the process
of growth and development of the world system. Now is the time to
draw up a master plan for sustainable growth and world development based
on global allocation of all resources and a new global economic system.
Ten or twenty years from today it will probably be too late."
- Club of Rome, Mankind at the Turning Point

"The concept of national sovereignty has been immutable,
indeed a sacred principle of international relations. It is a
principle which will yield only slowly and reluctantly to the new
imperatives of global environmental cooperation."
- UN Commission on Global Governance report

"Democracy is not a panacea. It cannot organize
everything and it is unaware of its own limits. These facts must be
faced squarely. Sacrilegious though this may sound, democracy is no
longer well suited for the tasks ahead. The complexity and the
technical nature of many of today's problems do not always allow elected
representatives to make competent decisions at the right time."
- Club of Rome, The First Global Revolution

"In my view, after fifty years of service in the United
National system, I perceive the utmost urgency and absolute necessity for
proper Earth government. There is no shadow of a doubt that the
present political and economic systems are no longer appropriate and will
lead to the end of life evolution on this planet. We must therefore
absolutely and urgently look for new ways."
- Dr. Robert Muller, UN Assistant Secretary General

"Nations are in effect ceding portions of their
sovereignty to the international community and beginning to create a new
system of international environmental governance as a means of solving
otherwise unmanageable crises."
- Lester Brown, WorldWatch Institute

"A keen and anxious awareness is evolving to suggest
that fundamental changes will have to take place in the world order and
its power structures, in the distribution of wealth and income."
- Club of Rome, Mankind at the Turning Point

"Adopting a central organizing principle means embarking
on an all-out effort to use every policy and program, every law and
institution, to halt the destruction of the environment."
- Al Gore, Earth in the Balance

"Effective execution of Agenda 21 will require a
profound reorientation of all human society, unlike anything the world has
ever experienced - a major shift in the priorities of both governments and
individuals and an unprecedented redeployment of human and financial
resources. This shift will demand that a concern for the
environmental consequences of every human action be integrated into
individual and collective decision-making at every level."
- UN Agenda 21

"The earth is literally our mother, not only because we
depend on her for nurture and shelter but even more because the human
sepcies has been shaped by her in the womb of evolution. Our
salvation depends upon our ability to create a religion of nature."
- Rene Dubos, board member Planetary Citizens